If Green Cars are only as Good as the Charging Options Available...

Electric cars happen to be the cleanest and greenest cars there are. As enthusiastic as people seem about them, they seem to not entirely be aware of how the transition to green cars won't come about just because manufacturers make cool new car models. Electric cars, to make any sense, need public charging stations - infrastructure that anyone can plug into for a quick charge while on a run. And there are all kinds of ideas in place that plan to bring this infrastructure about.

The Tennessee Valley Authority has a new kind of charging station prototype out in Knoxville - called the TVA Smart Station Initiative. The concept happens to be a pretty interesting one. You take your car to one of these charging stations and you see what looks like a huge carport - big enough to park several cars in. The top of the shade is actually a huge field of solar panels. Of course, since green cars need a considerable amount of power draw, a set of solar panels the size of six cars will never be able to actually charge six cars. They will only be able to supply a small fraction of the power needed.

The idea is that most cars that come by to get charged can get their power directly off the grid; but the solar panels, that will produce electricity whether or not there are cars charging at the station, will be feeding the grid for as long as there is sunlight. It happens to be a cute way in which to offset the kind of power that these cars draw. To make the power available at these charging stations extra cheap, there is a battery pack at each charging port that charges up on cheap power in the middle of the night when off-peak rates apply. Of course, each charging station costs hundreds of thousands of dollars; and cheap electricity is certainly not going to make enough of a profit for anyone. These are just experimental projects.

Now assuming that owners of green cars would be willing to actually plug their cars in and wait around for at least a half hour to be able to get a useful charge, there are other intriguing ideas out there as well. A new Silicon Valley startup with an iPhone app called PlugShare wonders if all this expense put into the building of charging stations could really be a bit unnecessary. Since every home has 117 V power, they wonder if they can get people to set up a little charging station in their driveways (which would amount to little more than a $1 power outlet) and sell power to anyone with an electric car who wishes to plug in. Owners of electric cars could just look up on their PlugShare app where they could find the nearest home with power outlets to share, and then drive over to plug in.

People who allow you to share their power outlets won't really be spending much - just about 15 cents an hour. If they want to charge a driver for it, they could do so.

If you're trying to go Green Cars that use Hybrid Technologies can be a Bad Idea

When the hybrid car revolution started out, people just took these cars on face value. If you wanted to go green, cars that used hybrid technology were obviously the way to go - they were specifically engineered to use gas more frugally. What was not to like about them? What could be better than the 40 mpg that the Prius was badged for? Well, in all kinds of ways, if you're trying to go green, cars that use hybrid technologies can be a bad idea.

We aren't really talking about inefficient hybrids like the Nissan Altima Hybrid or the Camry Hybrid either. The Prius, the granddaddy of them all, while it does actually deliver 40 mpg, only does that driving in a crowded city. On the highway, it's a completely different story.

Now this is the complete opposite of what it is with every other regular car. With any ordinary car, you get the best mpg ratings on the highway where the car can keep going smoothly without hindrance. In the city, as the engine in any regular car needs to keep working at a high basic RPM just to keep working, it needs to waste a lot of gas. On the Prius or any hybrid though, in stop-and-go traffic, the electric motor either takes over completely or it assists the gas engine all the time. In city traffic, the Prius and other hybrids like it are definitely very efficient.  On the highway on the other hand, they get no assistance from their puny electric motors and they have to depend entirely on their gasoline engines. And they become less efficient than your standard gas powered modern car. The Prius on the highway is far less efficient than a Corolla.

If you want to go green, cars that use hybrid technology are not a no-brainer. You have to think long and hard about what kind of use you'll put your car to. Now why on earth is spectacular technology like the hybrid system used on the Prius not good for the highway? Well, to begin with, a hybrid engine is only any use at very low speeds. At normal speeds, the electric motor just doesn't kick in. The electric motor and the big fat battery pack do sit in the car all the time though. And those highway speeds, all that is just so much dead weight that isn't good for anything. Your internal combustion engine has to work that much harder to lug all that dead weight around on the highway. Of course, it's going to be less efficient.

Hybrids make great sense for taxis and town buses that putter about town at low speeds stopping and starting all the time. They make no sense whatsoever for people who need to travel on freeways and highways regularly. Not to mention, if your reason for choosing a hybrid is that you wish to save the environment, hybrids really aren't the way to go. Those batteries are an environmental hazard. Their manufacture requires nickel that comes from a terrbly environmentally unfriendly mining process. And batteries are a nightmare to dispose of once you're done with them in eight years.

The Trend Future Cars will Take - Talking to one Another

People have certainly been talking about the flying car for long enough. There was a segment in Entertainment Tonight about 10 years ago about how the designers of the flying car were taking orders and Michael Jackson and Jay Leno had put their names down for one. People find it unreasonably entertaining to speculate on the kind of cars we might have in the future. The flying car isn't fantasy of course; that car is almost certainly going to be here soon. But what else are the designers of future cars doing? What other kinds of wondrous transportation solutions are we going to have over the next 10 years, short of a garbage-powered time-traveling DeLorean? If the cars of the future as speculated upon by Steven Spielberg in AI and by Paul Verhoeven in Total Recall didn't really float your boat, take a look at these models that follow. You'll find that real car makers really are more creative than movie prop car makers. And better still, these cars really are slated to hit showrooms sometime over the next 10 years.

A lot of the change that's coming over the next decade, as you might expect, will be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. One of the trends you're likely to see in future cars is that hybrids and electrics are going to go mainstream. Ferrari, Porsche and Rolls-Royce are developing their own hybrids and battery powered cars; manufacturers do consider hybrid technology to be rather awkward and inelegant - the weight of two separate propulsion systems and power sources on one car can be rather bothersome. But there is very little choice that they have. They need to comply with the government's strict new emission norms. But future cars aren't merely going to be about the greenness. They are also going to be about how their driven.

Google has already been in the news about how they've successfully test-driven over 100,000 miles in California, an automatic car driving system that can completely handle everyday roads and traffic. While this system won't be displacing drivers anytime soon, a lot of the abilities that they've demonstrated should spin off into some important advances in car safety. One thing cars will do soon is communicate with one another to help drivers avoid areas with poor traffic conditions. Future cars are not going to be isolated systems like they are today; they could be like smartphones - completely connected and always talking to one another to smoothe traffic situations.

Case in point, is a car from GM that kind of looks like a blown-up plastic toy. It's the GM Electric Networked Vehicle. This little futuristic pod car is armed to the teeth with sensors and a radars to help it park itself, be aware of other vehicles on the street, and so on. And oh, it's completely clean - it's battery-driven. Remember when Mercedes had a subcompact hatchback called the A-Class? Well, they're bringing it back in about two years; and this time, it's going to have a radars all over the place to keep you safe from accidents.

The exciting part of course is that these cars aren't just speculation.